AR: Experimenting with Vuforia Object Recognition on Android

NEW YORK - Oct. 27, 2017 - PRLog -- Nowadays Augmented Reality (AR) is getting more and more popular in mobile world. A lot of new AR applications are published every day. The reasons for that are quite obvious: the most information (about 90%) a person receives with the help of vision. By augmenting the real world with digital data, we enhance user's visual perception, which means we let users interact with information layered over the real world. This new approach transforms the way users see and use the mobile applications. The main domain areas, where it can be applied, are advertising, entertainment, game industry, education, interior design, etc.

There are different types of AR, each one better fits different use cases. There are several SDKs, which provide various features for developers: Wikitude, Vuforia, OpenCV, ARCore, etc. This article is about recognition-based AR and the experience we got while working with Vuforia SDK.
  BRIEFLY ABOUT VUFORIA
Vuforia is a software platform for creating AR applications. It has a wide range of features and its recognition capabilities include objects, images, cylinders, text, boxes and more. Originally, it was launched in 2011, and it's still under active development. As Vuforia is not an open source and free software, you need to have a license key to use it. But you can try it by using the Developer License Key and choose a pricing plan for your project later.
  OBJECT RECOGNITION
Object recognition allows you to detect and track 3D objects in an image or video sequence. In brief, it works as follows: an image is analyzed by recognition SDK to get a sufficient amount of feature points. It's done by matching the image with reference images of the real object prepared beforehand. If there are enough feature points, then recognition is successful. Finally, the SDK gives you a 3D location and orientation of an object, so that you can do the augmentation.
  OBJECT TARGETS DATABASE CREATION
After registering on Vuforia Developer Portal, you have access to resources provided by the platform: Vuforia SDK, samples, Vuforia Object Scanner, etc.

Object Targets are a digital representation of the features and geometry of a physical object. An Object Target is created by scanning a physical object using Vuforia Object Scanner. With this application, you scan an object from all sides to capture its vantage points that will be significant to your app's user experience. It allows you to test your scan results or continue scanning. Finally, it produces an Object Data (*.OD) file that includes the source data required to define an Object Target in the Target Manager on Vuforia Developer Portal. Here are the screenshots of our scanning process:

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